Belghast brought up the idea of Bad Luck Tokens, patent pending, as a way to deal with long strings of bad loot luck. When a boss drops nothing for you, you get one. Save up enough of them, and you can mail them in for a cool prize, just like when you'd collect box tops from the cereal that didn't come with a toy, only to cruelly find at that those were "box tops for education", not "box tops for entertainment", which you didn't realize because you'd not yet sent in enough box tops to learn to read, and then everyone at the breakfast table laughs and laughs and you can't leave the table until you're excused and they won't excuse you because they're too busy laughing that you can't read and squandered your box tops on stupid things like notebooks.

Getting the item you wanted sounds nice, in theory. But in terms of the actual player experience it is a terrible waste. You want the item the first few attempts. Getting it is just fine. But eventually it's not about the item. It's about revenge. Simply getting the item is like when the villain releases the hostages and escapes justice. Or worse, they're caught and sent to prison and you never get to punch them in the face even once, while they gloat at you and get out for good behavior and Dexter isn't a real person.

I propose that, rather than a simple campaign of mailing in the tokens for the item, you instead get the item directly. Using a Bottled Bad Luck causes the targeted boss to shrink to player size, deal no damage, and die in only a few hits. And respawn instantly until you leave. Now you're free to kill it until the item drops, or all the items, without a week of it taunting you. Or just kill it until you're bored. Or don't kill it and leave it attacking you, fruitlessly, while you type mean emotes.

On the first kill the boss would drop normal loot, gold, and reputation. After that it would only drops items. Any particular item can only show up once and it is lootable only by the player who used the bottled bad luck. Bottled bad luck would only be usable on bosses that have been killed at least four times in any mode.

After the player is done killing the boss an NPC shows up and asks, "Was that justice?" You may answer either "Yes" or "No, it was vengeance". Either answer triggers a cinematic in which your character throws aside their lit cigarette into a line of gasoline that ignites the boss's corpse, and then walks away with a grim look (the line of gasoline, not your character).

Valor Points and Justice Point do exist... but they simply are not that worthwhile this expansion. The gear you can get with Valor is really not even vaguely close to equivalent to what you can get in the dungeon. So it ends up being more of a consolation prize than trying to get that one thing you cannot seem to get otherwise. My post was mainly spurred on by a friend who has been trying for three months of downing a boss every single week to get the item he needs to drop. I went through the same thing back in Karazhan with the one item that refused to drop. I agree though... after a point it is more about revenge than anything else.

Basically Valor/Justice are just a means to "upgrade" existing gear through the item upgrade vendor. The real gear, the stuff people are actually wanting still only comes from raiding. There are no tier sets available this expansion from the valor vendor.

Long ago I raided Molten core for 8 months with no drops for my class at all. I'd have happily slaughtered all the bosses like this. :-) I had zg blues that were better than anything in MC by the time we stopped running it. Never once got a piece of T1. But the Warlocks and Pallys DE'd dozens of pieces of unusable gear.

Screw Valor tokens at that point Revenge is worth more than the gear. Though I'd like to see the boss shrink down to human size and become one of the developers and then I want to kill him till I get my gear.......

@Shintar: While I like the idea of badges, I think they've never worked quite right. They started off giving inferior but close items, were upgraded to allow players to gain loot far above their progression, regressed into a currency to push raiders into non-raid content, and now are a way to make us feel like we're progressing by spending large amounts for tiny upgrades.

@Electrolux: You just have no appreciation.

@Belghast: I fear I may suffer the same problem as the developers: I don't know what I want badges to do. Are they meant to give alternatives when RNG fails? If so, then why don't they give the exact missing item? But if they do that, then they're able to bypass progression.